Caetano Veloso Loves Israel, but Won’t Be Going Back

For most Brazilians, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is far from a pressing concern. But in recent months, one of Brazil’s most prominent figures, a revered singer, has found himself wrestling with a dilemma directly related to Israel’s continuing control over the territory, which is home to millions of Palestinians.

The musician, Caetano Veloso, visited the West Bank this summer before a concert in Tel Aviv.

Although their Tropicália music has a gentle beauty, Mr. Veloso and Mr. Gil are deeply political, so much so that in the 1960s the generals who ruled Brazil had them jailed and then forced into exile.

Before the start of their summer tour, the musicians were visited by two Brazilians from the B.D.S. campaign, which is explicitly modeled on the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, which included a cultural boycott. The young activists even took letters in support of the boycott from two veterans of that earlier campaign, Desmond Tutu and Roger Waters.

Mr. Veloso, who is 73, recalled in a telephone interview that he was skeptical of the campaign because, when he was a teenager, Israel had seemed like “a place of hope,” fiercely supported by intellectuals like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Although he had visited the country in the past, and firmly opposed the continuing occupation of the land Israel seized in 1967, he told the activists that he was not convinced.

“Being pro-Israel has become kind of a right-wing agenda, and being pro-Palestinian has become a left-wing agenda, and that’s too simplifying,” he said.

One week before the concert in Tel Aviv, Mr. Veloso recalled, he found himself talking backstage at the Teatro Real in Madrid with Jorge Drexler, a Uruguayan musician whose father was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Mr. Drexler told Mr. Veloso about a visit he had made to the West Bank with Breaking the Silence, a group of former Israeli soldiers who grew disaffected with the military occupation. He offered to put Mr. Veloso in touch with the former soldiers, who lead regular tours of the West Bank and collect testimonies from men and women who have served there.

That’s how, on the eve of their sold-out show, Mr. Veloso and Mr. Gil wound up on a guided tour of the West Bank village of Susiya. It was led by Yehuda Shaul, a founding member of Breaking the Silence who served as a combat soldier with the Nahal Brigade of the Israel Defense Forces during the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada.

The visit to Susiya — where the musicians were introduced to Nasser Nawaja, a community organizer fighting to stop the Israeli military from demolishing the shacks his extended family lives in there — “was very moving,” Mr. Veloso said.

As the small tour bus passed through the South Hebron Hills, “I felt like crying and I had to hold my tears,” he recalled, “because of the stories he was telling us about the occupation, this ex-soldier.”

At a news conference in Tel Aviv the next day, Israelis cheered Mr. Veloso when he said that he and Mr. Gil had resisted pressure to cancel their show because “we prefer dialogue.”

But video of the event he posted on Facebook later showed that his voice was full of emotion as he described the trip to Susiya and said it was time to “stop occupation, stop segregation, stop oppression.”

Still, because the musicians went ahead with their performance, the visit seemed like a blow to the boycott movement. At least, that is, until last month, when Mr. Veloso revealed in an account of the trip for the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo that he had continued to wrestle with what he had seen in the West Bank.

Most surprising was the end of the essay, in which Mr. Veloso wrote that despite his deep affection for Tel Aviv, a beach city where he feels instantly at home, he had been so distressed by his visit to Susiya that he was unlikely to ever return to Israel. The occupation reminded him of failed efforts to “pacify” Rio’s favelas with military police officers.

Being in Susiya, Mr. Veloso wrote, had convinced him that “the peace that I thought I had seen in Tel Aviv” was, in fact, “fragile, superficial and illusory.”

The singer said later that his change of heart was not an endorsement of the B.D.S. campaign.

“I agree with their position on the oppression and the occupation, but I don’t think the method is necessarily efficient, nor do I feel against Israel,” he said. “I have always loved Israel and I still do.”

“I didn’t want it to become ‘Caetano Veloso joined the B.D.S.,’ ” he said. “I didn’t.”

That nuance, however, was lost on activists working for and against the boycott movement. Supporters of the campaign hailed Mr. Veloso, while the head of the Jewish community in Brazil accused him of having “surrendered to the anti-Semitic wave.”

Mr. Veloso, who has followed the Internet debate over Israel and been horrified by it — “I saw a lot of madness there” — seemed stung by the accusation of anti-Semitism. He wanted to make it clear that he had come away from his trip to the region feeling closer to the Israeli dissidents he met than to the B.D.S. activists.

“I identified with the guy from Breaking the Silence, who is radically critical of the occupation, but he doesn’t want to deny the existence of the state of Israel,” Mr. Veloso said.

While it seems fair to ask if depriving Tel Aviv liberals of live music could really bring about a revolution in Israeli-Palestinian affairs, at least one Israeli critic of the occupation argues that the boycott campaign has some value as a prod to conversation inside Israel.

“It’s true that boycott efforts make Israelis more angry and bitter,” Noam Sheizaf, an Israeli journalist, observed in an email, but “they also raise the cost of the status quo, and force Israelis to debate the occupation — something they avoid doing at other times.”

Mr. Sheizaf, who watched the furor over Mr. Veloso’s stance play out, said he was puzzled by it.

“I am not sure how we can tell an artist that he must sing and dance before Israelis if he prefers not to, under these political circumstances,” he said. “Caetano Veloso came to Israel, performed here, met people and ended up not liking what he saw. What exactly do people want from him now — to force him to change his mind?”